Santa Cruz Day Trip

One thing that I like about living in the South Bay is being close to so many great places where we can take day trips or fun overnight trips. There are many places an hour or less a way (Santa Cruz, Half Moon Bay, San Francisco, Muir Woods (redwoods), camping sites, and other places if you want to travel a little further (Monterey).

On the 5th of July I had the day off and we went for a day trip to Santa Cruz. We ate at our favorite restaurant, Cafe Brasil. Jackson tried some feijoada for the first time.

Afterwards we went to the beach about 1.3 miles outside of the main Santa Cruz boardwalk. We basically just walked around a bit and played on the beach. Here are some pictures.

Daddy and Jackson at the lighthouse

 He's not a huge fan of the sun in his eyes.

Jackson's first time stepping in the ocean. He wasn't a huge fan. Too cold.

Jason's Visit and Santa Cruz

A day after I got back from Utah my brother Jason came to visit us and to see the Bay Area. He actually got engaged that evening! Then he got on a plane and flew out here for a 5 days, haha. So we got to hear a lot of the wedding planning as they Skyped with each other. Unfortunately, I couldn't get time off that week, so our only day to go out and do something fun with him was on Saturday. We decided to go down to Santa Cruz, California. Our first stop was a really yummy Brazilian restaurant called Cafe Brasil. Christina and I had been there before and really enjoyed it. Jason ended up really liking the food too. We got the exact same thing we got last time. Here is Jason and I outside the restaurant.

After that we went to the Santa Cruz Boardwalk.

Jackson slept pretty much the whole time. This was his first all-day outing.

We walked on the giant pier and saw some sea lions.

We also found some cool beach art.

We also took Jackson for a ride on the beach.

All in all it was a very fun day!

Kayaking at Half Moon Bay

A few months ago I bought a kayak rental for half off on Living Social. Maybe some other blog post I'll talk about how awesome I think Living Social is. Groupon too, but I like Living Social better. 

We'd been looking to use it for the past several weeks, but every time we have time the weather doesn't look like it'll be that great. Earlier this week I saw that it was supposed to be sunny over the weekend. Half Moon Bay is about 45 minutes away, but the temperature is always about 10 degrees lower than where we live. It was bright and sunny in Sunnyvale when we left on Saturday, but as we approached the ocean the clouds appeared. They didn't go away either. But that's okay, we still had a blast!

The rental was for a two-person kayak and included wetsuits, windbreaker jackets, and life-jackets. I had never been in a kayak (this is a sit-on-top kayak versus a traditional). Christina had once before. I'd been in canoes several times before. I sat in back and it was nice to be able to steer with a rudder, and not by synchronizing your paddle strokes. We paddled around the harbor. It was a good workout, but also relaxing when we would stop paddling and rest on the water. This is the only picture that we got because even though I wrapped it in two ziploc bags, I was worried about dropping the camera. We certainly had a fun time!

Capitola and Santa Cruz

I was lucky and got the Friday before Memorial Day off in addition to Monday. This is because at work we don't get holidays off like President's Day or MLK Jr. Day (busy season), so they give it to us as an extra long weekend on Memorial Day, July 4th, and even Labor Day. Christina still had to nanny in the afternoon, so we decided to take a little trip to the beach in the morning.

It's really nice because we have several beaches within 1.5 hours of us. The water's not very warm, but the beach was very pleasant. We drove down to an area called Capitola, about an hour away. While there we walked along the beach, went to the wharf, and walked around the shops (not many were open yet).

Afterwards we drove about 15 minutes over to Santa Cruz, a more well-known neighboring city. I had heard about a Brazilian restaurant there called Café Brasil. It's not the rodízio de carne (all you can eat meat) that most people have heard about or experienced somewhere. It's just authentic Brazilian food. Christina and I got an extra plate of rice, farofa, spinach, and orange slices and shared a bowl of feijoada.

Feijoada is a yummy mixture of black beans and different meats.

We then got some açaí na tigela.

 This was one of Christina's favorite things when we went to Brazil. It's made from açaí (ah-sigh-EE), a fruit that grows in the Amazon rainforest. Açaí na tigela has a sorbet-like texture. It comes topped with granola, bananas, (and in this case) strawberries. É uma delícia!

We couldn't believe how much fun we crammed into a few hours!

Dune Buggy Rides! ou seja, Passeio de Buggy

Friday was a blast! We left at 9:30am in a dune buggy to spend the day cruising up the coast north of Natal. We visited a few lakes, rivers, and several beaches. We also had a lot of fun going all over the sand dunes. There are two ways to do it, com emoção or sem emoção. Which means to ride in an adventurous way or not. Our driver definitely did the adventurous way. Other cars would be driving in a straight line and ours would be swerving back and forth on the sand, just for fun.

We had a lot of great picture taking opportunities. I believe this picture was taken from the Genipabu Dunes looking down at the beach.

These were the rafts that we crossed the river on.

We stopped to go swimming in this lake. I thought it was cool that some of the chairs and tables are in the water.

A cool rock formation from the sand.

Our driver dropped us off and we walked through this river. It looks brown, but is actually extremely clear and clean--that's just the sand underneath.

At the end of the river we bought this yummy drink. It wasn't quite a juice. They mashed up the pineapple a little bit, but we still were able to each chunks of pineapple.

Driving through the river.

At one point in the dune buggy we drove down this almost vertical hill that was 30 meters high. Christina describes it as being like a roller coaster, but without anything to hold you in (the back seats don't have seat belts, and that's legal in Brazil). Christina and the other Brazilian girl screamed a lot, while me and the other guy laughed a lot (with a few screams at the really scary parts like that).

We also did a cool zipline into a lake. We don't have pictures of that but did get it on film. If I can figure out how to transfer it from my video camera to here I will. That was one of the biggest highlights.

Natal has been a lot of fun. We're now in Patos, Paraíba. We took a 8 hour bus ride to get here. It's a city out in the middle of nowhere, unfortunately not close to a beach. Tomorrow we are going to João Pessoa.